Don't Punish Parochial School Parents

Why should I be penalized for trying to give my children a solid moral grounding through a good Jewish education?

Despite the common wisdom that the United States is the most religious of all Western democracies, this is a country which, in its most important aspect, can be deeply hostile to religion. I got a powerful reminder of the depth of that hostility recently, when I received this year's tuition bills for my children's private Jewish day schools.

I'll withhold the total dollar amount, because I don't want you to have a coronary, but with seven children in private religious education, and with tuition for Jewish day schools running at about $9,000 per child (and that's with a discount), you can easily imagine the astronomical bill. Still, I'm prepared to cover this huge sum because a religious and moral education for my children is non-negotiable. But here's the rub. In addition to the high tuition that I struggle to meet, I am also required to pay steep property taxes to cover the public school system that my kids would be using if they were not in parochial schools.

That's right. The United States, alone among the great democracies of the world, shows contempt for religious parents by making them pay twice for their children's education, refusing to put even a single dollar of their tax money toward their children's religious schools.

Why should parents be penalized for wanting to give their children a religious education? Is it a sin to teach children the need for spirituality in life, to condition them to the sanctity of human life, and to expose them to the great ethical code contained in the Ten Commandments? Is it right to be penalized tens of thousands of dollars each year for wanting to give children a solid moral and ethical education that will make them more readily appreciate the democratic and humanitarian ideals upon which a great country like the United States is built, and be more patriotic as a result?

It is precisely the moral values children absorb in a religious school that will ensure that they grow to be law-abiding citizens and therefore, even in the most practical sense, of great economic value to their country. After all, what percentage of kids who receive a solid religious and moral grounding end up robbing a liquor store and going to prison, or becoming drug addicts, and thereby costing the state tens of thousands of dollars per year in prison or rehabilitation costs? And yet it is precisely those parents for whom a religious education is not pivotal, and who are prepared to risk their kids in the dangerous jungles of the American public school system, with its much higher rate of juvenile delinquency, who are given massive financial incentives to do so.

When I lived in England, as the rabbi at Oxford University for 11 years, my children attended some of the best Jewish day schools in the world. Yet the cost to me was minimal, because the British government subsidizes the cost of the secular curriculum, while the religious studies are, of course, paid for by the parents.

Parents in Israel, of course, have it much better. As Jewish parents in a Jewish state, they can send their kids to the most religious day schools at practically no cost, their tax dollars being used, rightly, to fund their children's complete education. But even solidly secular countries such as Canada and France, which Americans perceive as being hostile to religion, all have government subsidies for religious schools. Only America, the most religious of them all, brutally punishes religious parents by not allowing their hard-earned tax dollars to fund their children's parochial schools.

The net result is that the escalating cost of religious day school tuition has simply become unaffordable for most American families. Virtually every religious family I know struggles very hard just to meet the tuition bills. Then, when they need a scholarship, as virtually every family does, they are subjected to the humiliation of having to go before scholarship boards and reveal every last family expenditure. Many throw in the towel and send their kids to public schools rather than face financial ruin. The religious majority in the United States, who demonstrated their phenomenal political power in the last election by keeping George W. Bush in power amidst a liberal onslaught to oust him, don't seem to care much about the issue of parochial school education. Even many religious Christians are content to leave their children in public schools, with their loose morals and lax standards, or home school them, an admirable choice increasingly common among evangelical Christians, but very difficult for orthodox Jewish families who typically have much larger families than their evangelical counterparts.

Indeed, the voucher movement in the United States, which would give parents far greater choice for their children's schooling, has generated little political support. Which explains why, with a battle raging over the replacement for the moderate Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, all the talk among the faithful is of having a conservative justice who will help to ban abortion rather than one who will help curb the increasing hostility to G-d in America's public spaces.

But the assault against G-d and religion in the American educational scene is a far more pressing issue. Every adult is primarily a product the influences of their formative years. If America is to continue to be a mighty and moral nation, then it will have to produce a generation of adults who are taught as children that life is more than just the pursuit of money and fame. America's kids require exposure to the religious message that human beings are born for service rather than adventure, to reconcile with their fellow human beings as colleagues rather than to compete against them as adversaries. In a world of endless strife, there is no more important idea than the religious teaching that all are created in G-d's image and all are therefore brethren.

With our nation combating terrorism around the world, it is pivotal that we remember that the principal means by which Islamic fundamentalists foster hatred against the United States is by falsely painting Americans as godless materialists and decadent infidels. They are wrong, of course. But it would be good if our public policy priorities in education finally confirmed the place of G-d in American life rather than treating the Creator as an unwelcome intruder.